Depending on whose numbers you believe, 40 percent-to-60 percent of students entering two- and four-year colleges need at least one remedial writing course. This represents a significant percentage of our most successful kids, the ones who get past high school to some sort of post-secondary education. This makes you wonder about the writing skills of the kids who donât go to college at all and the far too many kids who drop out before finishing high school.
Writing requires us to coordinate many different intellectual competencies in precise ways. For this reason, it is a very demanding skill to master. But it appears that we are not even approaching mastery at this time; we are barely achieving competence.
Traditionally, writing has been viewed as a narrowly-defined subject. However, itâs actually a broadly used process, one that requires kids to take raw ideas, form them into sensible bits of language, and then work those bits into polished prose.
An All-Around Player
Writing is required in almost all subject areas. Poor writing skills can take their toll across an entire report card. As pediatric neurologist Dr. Mel Levine writes in his book, The Myth of Laziness: âWriting is the largest orchestra a kidâs mind has to conductâŚthe very fact that writing is so complex justifies its leading role in a curriculum.â
But writing doesnât have a leading role in our curriculum; in most schools, itâs barely an understudy. Dr. Levine feels that this robs students of valuable learning experiences from which they might otherwise benefit: The ability to “mesh multiple brain functions” , build the “brain pathways that connect diverse functions such as language, memory and motor control”, and learn the kind of “systemic thinking” and “problem solving” needed for critical thinking and career success.
Writing and reading are so intimately connected that improvements in one often lead to improvements in the other. More writing might help more kids succeed in both reading and math. Writing requires all the skills of reading (because you canât write anything without being able to read it back) plus some of the logical skills associated with math and science. It is one of the best ways to teach critical thinking skills.
For very young children, writing improves small motor coordination. Phonics skills are also strengthened when kids write as they learn new sound-symbol correspondences. For some children, the first sentences they read are the ones they write.
For older kids, writing is typically the most common way teachers assess student learning. Written work is heavily weighted in some classes, especially at the high school level. Through note-taking in content-heavy classes, writing is also an important way learners organize and retain knowledge. Itâs a powerful tool for helping kids reorganize and retain what they have learned.
Clearly, writing is a key component of college and career readiness. Itâs also a powerful tool for exercising the mind. Yet we simply donât give it the emphasis it deserves. It isnât a priority at the national level, at the state level, among district administrators, or even among many teachers or policymakers. And our kids, especially those who may not have strong support for writing at home, pay dearly.
Why Do Kids Write So Poorly?
There are two reasons why our kids write so poorly: They donât write very often; and they arenât taught very well.
A Ford Foundation study conducted in the 1980s by writing expert Donald Graves found that kids wrote in school less than one day out of ten. Kids write more often than that today but not nearly enough to become sufficiently skilled.
In another Ford Foundation study, Graves asked two groups of adults — professional writers and corporate professionals who use writing as part of their work — how many teachers who taught them anything about writing that they use in the work. The average number of teachers listed in the non-professional writing group was two. The average in the professional writing group was zero. Obviously, writing instruction in the previous generation didnât match up well with the needs of working professionals at the time.
Again, this situation is probably a little better today. But weâre still a long way from providing kids with the kind of instruction they need to meet the challenges of college and career.
Ironically, there has been an explosion in resources and support for writing during the last twenty years. Hundreds of excellent books are now available regarding successful approaches to teaching writing in schools Organizations like the National Writing Project reach thousands of teachers each year and offer a wide variety of valuable programs. But these resources are not translating into practice that is pushing its way through the classroom door.
In reading, we work hard to make sure everyone gets it. In math, weâre happy if some of our kids get it. In writing, almost no one gets it. And it doesnât seem to bother us very much. We tend to have a fixed mindset about writing: writers are born not made, some people can do it, others canât; instruction is irrelevant.
Lack of Training, Lack of Confidence
The most common reason Language Arts teachers give for not teaching writing very effectively is that they donât know how. Instruction in writing methods is not a common part of pre-service teacher preparation; few teachers seek to master it on their own.
The second reason is that many Language Arts teachers will say about teaching writing is that they donât feel like competent writers themselves. Language Arts has traditionally been focused on the acquisition of decoding, fluency, and literal comprehension at the lower grades and the appreciation of literature at the upper grades. Writing has never played a prominent role.
Teachers feel bad about both of these realities and bad feelings lead to avoidance. In a test-driven age that privileges reading and math above all else, itâs easy to rationalize not teaching writing, especially when youâre uncomfortable with it and youâve got a great set of classic novels on the shelves that you enjoy and have taught half a dozen times.
Writing isn’t a mandated element of the No Child Left Behind Act. So most tests at the K-12 level don’t involve writing outside of expository essays. Even though writing components have been added to popular college aptitude tests like the SAT, this incentive has provided insufficient motivation for changing the way we approach writing K-12. Kids receive more writing instruction now than they used to, and they are slightly more likely to experience a competent writing teacher, but the amount and quality of instruction young writers receive is still woefully inadequate.
The Cost of Insufficient and Ineffective Instruction
Reading and writing go together. They are not two separate subjects but two complementary halves of the same process of literacy. They should be taught in a thoughtfully integrated fashion. Yet they have always been separated in our curriculum and, for the most part, they continue to be separated today
In a sense, weâre prisoners of the oldest concept in all of American education: The Three âRâsâ. Readinâ, writinâ, and ârithmetic have always been considered three separate subjects. Historically, reading and writing have been separated because writing wasnât composition; it was handwriting, spelling, and grammar.
Prior to World War II, there wasnât much need for most children to learn to express themselves in print. Most would leave school with 8th grade educations or high school diplomas at best, and then head off to blue collar work where the ability to read might be important but where there was little need for writing.
Times have changed, of course, but our curriculum has not. While itâs possible for students to graduate high school with poor writing skills, it is impossible for those who canât write to pursue a college preparatory high school education, to experience success at a post-secondary institution, and to rise up in the world of work beyond a certain level.
New standards from the Common Core State Standards Initiative provide us with writing examples from K-12 students in a variety of modes and forms. As the samples reach up into high school, the quality demanded of students for career and college readiness is pretty good.
We can only assume that this level of quality will be expected of students on the new tests coming in just the next few years. If writing is rigorously tested it will receive more attention in the classroom.
But writing cannot be taught successfully from a textbook or other âpre-fabâ resources. Nor can it easily be taught in a defined scope and sequence. A person teaching writing has to know how to write and how to transfer that skill to students.
Writing is a highly individual subject. Even when we ask writers to start from the same place, we donât want them all to produce the same result. This is the opposite of most school subjects. In typical content area subjects, we present students with the same information, hope they retain it, and then ask them to give it back to us in nearly identical answers on tests.
If we looked at writing this way, and asked each student to turn in the same essay, weâd call it plagiarism, not writing. Individual expression is a key component of writing success. Teaching kids how to express themselves is not something schools are well-designed to do.
In tomorrowâs continuation on writing, we will talk more about how to improve writing instruction without losing student individuality.
